Universities can’t fulfill the myth, but they can’t become vocational schools either

Universities come with a mythical mission. But they don't fulfill it.

Is it time to rethink higher education? I'm someone who went through the system and I'm now, to a greater or lesser extent, contributing to its maintenance, so it seems strange that I should advocate its dismantling. Yet I'm beginning to think that I ought to.

Unlike most rants of this nature, I have no complaints about the modern standard of education. The myth of falling standards has been with us since the Roman republic decided that they wanted the south of France as their personal back garden. If they really were falling for that long, we would all be living in caves wondering how our fore bearers were able to create this thing called fire.

Indeed, I think that students today learn a hell of a lot more than I did in my day. Although I may mourn the fact that Lagrangian mechanics is now a footnote on the way to a physics degree, that is not a sign of falling standards, but rather tells us that it is more important to learn other things to obtain a relevant education.

No, my complaint is that universities do not fill the role that there were supposed to play, and they are very inefficient at fulfilling the role that they actually play.

The rose colored past that never was

Usually when people extol the virtues of universities, they discuss teaching people how to think, and how to critically examine evidence and ideas. The ideal role of this sort of university is to churn out well-rounded individuals who can think independently. Most people who despair of today's youth seem to think that these ideal universities are a casualty of the modern world. The young lads that universities used to produce—ladies being considered too delicate in nature to actually think in those days—were supposed to cast a jaundiced eye over society and to defend against iniquities of government, big business, and, in general, be superheroes without a secret identity.

My point here is not that this ideal was a bad thing, but that universities were never intended to be places to develop independent inquiring minds. And today, universities are ill suited to developing independent inquiring minds.

In the past, universities really only served two purposes. You can see this by examining who attended universities, and what those people went on to do. Traditionally, the university intake was dominated by young men who had attended private schools. That is, young men from rich families would be sent to Eaton or Rugby to learn their letters and look down on everyone else. After a smooth passage through these schools, they were sent on to Oxford or Cambridge to complete their education.

They didn't really go to university to learn anything much. Instead, the effect of going to private schools and university was to develop a circle of close friends who could be relied upon to continue to smooth each other's passage through life. That was the primary purpose of university: to give young men a chance to form bonds of friendship that would serve to secure and increase their family interests in the future.

Which brings us to what these young folk went on to do. Sure, some went on to specialized professions, such as law or medicine. But, a significant fraction came from families that were rich and had diverse interests: a family might own land with tenant farmers, part of a shipping fleet, a plantation in the Caribbean, and a small Indian village. To successfully manage diverse interests does not require a degree in physics, or mathematics, or (heaven forbid) business management. Even as a younger son with very little in the way of prospects, a life in government service—invading other nations for fun and profit—would not benefit from a degree in a specific topic.

This brings us to the second reason for the existence of universities. Young men, when they have finished high school are still a little too enthusiastic and impulsive to be given charge of a multimillion dollar business. So, they were sent to university to mature. Any actual learning they did was a happy accident.

I think it is pretty easy to see that this model is never going to serve in terms of creating independent thinkers. The university was a place that shaped young men to maintain their power and position. Doing so meant they shouldn't think too critically about the society in which they lived. Which is not to say that none did, or that none of the teachers encouraged it. Rather, this type of thinking was present in what was very much a minority of students, and it was an unintended positive consequence of the university system.

An educational square peg being driven into a round hole

The world has moved on. Although universities still play the networking role, they have taken on additional responsibilities. The majority of young people—one of the positive changes was opening up higher education to women—go to university for vocational training. You sign up to do a degree in physics or medicine or law. And, when you study for a specific topic, you spend the vast majority of your time treading water in a sea of necessary details.

I would argue that the majority of university courses are the same. A degree course in just about any subject doesn't actually provide the core skills required for independent thought and critical thinking—it just gives you the background to understand the areas where independent thought is taking place. The course teachers are so busy trying to cram those details into student's heads that they have no time to explicitly teach critical thinking skills.

Further Reading

In short, any student who emerges from university with good critical thinking skills has achieved that by accident, not by the university's design. I would also argue that the courses that come closest to achieving the ideal are history, English, and philosophy. This is probably because the subject matter is, from a "we make stuff and everything else is fluff" perspective, useless. That allows the students to focus on the important things like logic, analysis, and the importance of ingrained societal values.

Even assuming this is true, though, these courses still don't achieve as much as we would like them to. There is more to critical thinking than being able to string together a chain of logic in a coherent manner, and arts subjects are undervalued anyway.

A structural problem

The apparent loss of critical thinking is only a small thing—and, as I will discuss below, not entirely real. The bigger problem is that, because it is believed that universities have the role of providing some ideal in education, we devalue the actual teaching part. Yes, teaching at most universities is no different from open mic night at your local pub. You might occasionally get someone with the voice of an angel. But mostly you get Nickelback.

The lack of teaching skills means we are supporting institutions that not only don't do what we idealize them to do, they don't value and professionalize the things that we expect them to do well. In fact, we have gone to extremes to prevent the job of university teaching from becoming a profession. The most obvious example is hiring adjunct professors. These are people who are hired for about the same wage as a fast food server, and are expected to teach physics or philosophy to 18 year olds. They don't get benefits or even long-term contracts. So, in effect, they never get the chance to develop into highly skilled teaching professionals. Instead, they spend most of their time worrying about heating bills and whether they can afford to go to the doctor.

Now, of course, universities will argue that they are research organizations. And that is true. Universities do value research over teaching. Meaning that tenured and tenure-track professors, even if they love teaching, cannot prioritize it, because their administration requires them to be good researchers. Indeed, if you admit that you are a middling to average researcher and want to focus on teaching, you become viewed a burden by your department.

Yet, for the great majority of people, their only interaction with a university is through the people doing the teaching. It's as if a major corporation, say General Motors, decided that their public face would not be their most visible product—hello Chevy Volt—and instead decides to place the janitorial service front and center. Then, just to top it off, decided not to train the janitors.

Teaching is not for amateurs

Many universities are starting to take teaching more seriously. However, this has not extended to the point where they actually acknowledge that teaching is a profession. Or that teaching techniques are amenable to scientific study—meaning actual teaching research that can be applied to developing best practices . Bringing that knowledge to the shop-floor, so to speak, is a part of the problem that is not being addressed in any coherent way.

The second part of the problem—teachers are under-valued—is not, to my knowledge, being addressed at all. A teaching career at a university, even one that markets itself as a big whoop research university, needs to be viable and rewarding. And realistically, that means creating two equally valued career tracks.

By giving professors a choice of career tracks, the university benefits in two ways. Those who are really motivated to teach get the chance to excel at it, while not struggling to obtain funds to support underperforming research programs. Students don't end up saddled with excellent researchers who would rather be in the lab than in the classroom. Those who love and are good at both will be in the happy position of having both skill sets acknowledged. And, the university gets to advertise that it has the best teachers and the best researchers.

Getting critical

The third part of the problem is more subtle. We assume that critical thinking skills are rather generic; if you learn them in one domain, they can be automatically transferred to another. I don't believe that this is as true as we would like it to be.

The skills we learn in science are very strong on data analysis within a framework. For instance, if I am analyzing data from an experiment, then that is usually done within the bounds of an appropriate theory. Even if I find that my data shows the theory to be wrong, there is usually a deeper theory or set of principles that can be applied. Even for truly radical ideas, we fall back on some very fundamental tenets: conservation of energy, conservation of mass, and causality, to name a few. Working within these frameworks is the sort of skills that every scientist can apply to their domains. Indeed, these are the skills that I would expect students to start picking up during their university education.

But the skills are not in logic, or gathering evidence, or stringing the argument together—although these are certainly important. No, the skill is actually recognizing which framework to use to analyze your data. To understand what data is important, you also need to understand the framework and how that data fits (or not) within that framework. What data is trivial (but necessary)? What data is unnecessary? Which parts of the framework are important? How significant is this particular piece of information? These questions can only be answered by having a deep understanding of the framework yet being willing to question it.

By considering critical thinking skills as some sort of knowledge-independent toolkit, we are leading students (and ourselves) astray. The consequences of this are perfectly illustrated in the fact that this XKCD cartoon exists. In short, because we insist that the skills used to analyze problems are domain independent, we devalue the deep subject knowledge required to make those skills useful.

Is there a solution?

I don't believe that we can actually do much about this. There are always those who go on to higher education seeking what is actually a vocational education: be it science, engineering, or math students, they are simply seeking a means to a job. Nevertheless, universities remain one of the only places where young people will encounter new ideas. This creates a tension: should we give in to the pressure, and become vocational training centers? After all that is what the majority of students, parents, employers, and politicians want.

Universities have never met the ideal that we hold them to but, on balance, I think they are better than the alternatives. Still, I think we could come closer to meeting that ideal if we acknowledged a few small facts. We should recognize that teaching is a profession that requires training and career development, so we need to provide a path for such at higher education. We should be explicit in acknowledging that critical thinking skills, logic, and reasoning, are not sufficient—domain knowledge matters. And, just as importantly, we need to teach people to recognize when they run up against the limits of the domains they know well.

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Chris Lee
Chris writes for Ars Technica's science section. A physicist by day and science writer by night, he specializes in quantum physics and optics. He is delocalised, living and working in Eindhoven and Enschede, the Netherlands. Emailchris.lee@arstechnica.com//Twitter@exMamaku